Can identity appeals in party communication or news media influence voter perceptions?

Marvin Stecker
Fabienne Lind
Hajo G. Boomgaarden
Markus Wagner

2024-05-03

Motivation

How do voters learn these perceptions? How malleable are they long-term?

Party positioning

News media

They are listening

Expectations

The closer

  1. a political party
  2. media reporting

positions a party to a certain social group,

the more likely in-group members of that group will be to associate that party with representing their group’s interests.

Data & Methods

  • party positions: computational text analysis of press releases
  • media reporting: computational text analysis of party mentions in news articles
  • perceived party-group link: “How closely do you think party X looks after the interests of …”
    • panel data from the British Election Study (3 waves, N = 4000+)
    • covering: ethnicity, age, education and class

Text Analysis of Party Positions

  1. party press releases scraped from websites
  2. fine-tuned transformer model to extract social group references at the word level (Licht and Sczepanski 2023)
  3. categorisation into eight categories with NLI (Laurer et al. 2024)
  4. aggregation: 3 months prior to survey wave with monthly recency weight (De Vreese et al. 2017)
  5. respondent assignment via exposure question: How often has party X contacted you in the last 4 weeks?
  6. estimating party-crossed within-between models (Bell and Jones 2015)

Results

(extremely preliminary)

What voters think

What parties do

Take-Aways

  • party communication and media reporting are both important but distinct influences on voters’ perceptions

  • text analysis and linkage designs can help our understanding

  • preliminary results:

    • parties can influence voters’ perception of social group representation, perhaps irrespective of group membership of the recipients

Thank You For Your Attention!

Marvin Stecker

www.marvinstecker.com

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